中文字的無意識整合：來自物體為基注意力的證據

Unconscious Grouping of Chinese Characters: Evidence from Object-based Attention

我們藉由檢驗在視野邊緣呈現的中文雙字詞是否能在部分單字不可見時整合，來展現在閱讀中一個發生於目前凝視點之外的無意識知覺歷程。我們呈現兩個雙字詞，並且藉由同物效果，一種用來作為知覺組織形成以及注意力選擇（亦即，物體為基注意力）的指標，來探討雙字詞的可見與不可見單字之間是否能夠整合。實驗結果顯示，在先後判斷作業中，兩個同時出現的目標被判斷孰先孰後的比例不同：在被注意力提示過的雙字詞上出現的目標比較常被判斷為較早出現。這樣的結果顯示，當雙字詞的兩個單字一個為可見，另一個為不可見時，知覺組織仍然可以形成。在知覺組織形成之時，雙字詞中的不可見單字仍然維持不可見，顯示知覺組織在無意識下完成。這結果暗示了，在閱讀中，在視野邊緣的單字可以在不需要讀者對於所有組成字有意識的情形下組織成字詞。而這樣的無意識整合可以藉由將文字預先聚合成較少的有意義單元以減少所需要的凝視點數目而促進閱讀的流暢性。

To show that, in reading, a fundamental and unconscious perceptual process occurs beyond the current fixation, we examined whether peripherally presented characters of Chinese words in such extreme viewing conditions could be grouped when some characters were rendered invisible while others were visible. We presented a pair of two-character Chinese words and indexed whether the visible and invisible characters that formed a word could be grouped together by the effect of same-object advantage—an index used to indicate the formation of perceptual grouping and the basis for attentional selection (i.e. object-based attention). Results revealed a difference in the judgments of prior entry that would otherwise be equivalent between two concurrent targets in a cued temporal-order judgment task: the target that appeared in the cued word was judged to appear first more frequently than the other target that appeared in the uncued word. The results suggest that a perceptual grouping was formed for two-character words between visible and invisible constituent characters. While grouping within two-character words occurred, the invisible characters remained invisible in most of the trials, suggesting that this grouping occurred unconsciously. This implies that, in reading, characters presented in the peripheral region can be grouped into words even without the readers’ awareness of all the constituent characters, and such unconscious grouping can facilitate fluent reading by aggregating the texts into fewer meaningful units and thus reduce the number of fixations needed.